The story by 11-year-old Nate Sheehan, “Conrad and Fate” is about prejudice based on a student’s ethnicity. This story, set in the late 1950s is about prejudice against Japanese people, something that was very strong in in the United States during and some time after World War II, which ended in 1945. If you follow the news at all, then you know that today (in 2019) there is a big rise in prejudice in the United States and in other parts of the world. People trying to come to the United States for a safer and better life are being stopped at the Mexican border. People who get caught sneaking through are being put in prison. This includes children. Adults and children are being treated badly. And in our schools, and on our streets, there is increasing intolerance for people born in other countries, or whose parents were born in other countries, especially if their skin tone is not “white.” And also an increase in prejudice against people who are not Christians. It is very easy to write an essay that talks about why prejudice against others is bad. But essays rarely convince people. Fiction can be a more effective way of arguing for things you believe in. Empathy, the ability to share and imagine the feelings of others is one of the most powerful human emotions. Empathy is what makes it possible for a writer to create convincing fictional characters. Your job as an author highlighting how it feels to be discriminated against is to make your readers identify with the character so that they can imagine what it would be like for this to happen to them. The activity In this writing activity we want you to write a story from the viewpoint of a person who is thought of as “other,” like the Japanese boy in the story “Conrad and Fate” published in the January/February 2015 issue of Stone Soup. Write about what it feels like to have to fight for acceptance because of something you have no control over–your religion, where you were born, or where your parents were born, or because of the color of your skin. Perhaps you have had personal experiences of prejudice of these kinds–I have. It has been fifty-five years since I was in middle school and bent down to pick a penny up off the concrete in front of a classroom only to discover it was glued down, and that I was surrounded by a group of boys shouting “Jew!” and laughing. This memory is fresh, like it happened yesterday. Think about your own experiences and the feelings you had at the time, and try to imagine them happening to someone else. What does it feel like to be mocked, teased, excluded, or worse, because you are not seen as a person by other students? This is a story, so show us what it feels like.
story writing
Writing Activity: inspiration from science-based common expressions
There are a lot of science-based ideas expressed in everyday speech. This activity challenges you to identify some of those expressions, think about what they mean, research them to find out the science behind them, and then write about some characters experiencing those phenomena or expressing the emotions they describe. You might literally put a character in a situation governed by a scientific effect, or you might use the science as a metaphor for the person’s behavior. We often speak of people “having chemistry.” When you get to the stage in life where you start falling in love you may tell your best friend about this new love in your life that “I felt this chemistry!” They mean, they felt a strong reaction to the person, like bubbling chemicals in a test tube. People say of some couples that they are “so different,” but “opposites attract.” This is a reference to magnets. The plus and minus sides of the magnet are tightly drawn together, whereas you cannot get either plus/plus or minus/minus combinations to attach however hard you try. They “repell” one another. People will say of someone who shows big emotions that they “erupted like a volcano.” When an audience is sitting waiting for a speaker who they really want to hear they might say, “there was electricity in the room,” or “the atmosphere was electric”. This is the idea that the room feels full of pent up electrical energy—like everyone’s hair is standing up on end, or the pressure is high, as if there is about to be an electrical storm with all the drama of thunder and lightning. I want you to think of other expressions, like, “they don’t mix, they are like oil and water” and then do some research into the science behind the expression. Why don’t oil and water mix? What is really happening in a volcano? How do storms work, and what stages do they go through? Choose your science-based expression, gain a clearer idea about what the science is through some research, and then use these details to inform how you set your scene and portray the motivations behind your characters’ actions. As an example, under a volcano (which might look like a big silent hunk of rock most of the time) there is a molten pool of magma. You might think of this as a pool of tumultuous emotions. You will learn that before an eruption there is usually an increase in earthquakes in the surrounding area as the ground starts to shift. We usually can’t feel these shifts, but they are important to the science of volcanos, and helpful to a writer using volcanic activity as a metaphor. What is the role of the these earthquakes, what do they mean, and how might you show characters or a situation that is about to erupt like a volcano experiencing or displaying these more or less silent signs? To see an example of writing informed by well-researched knowledge of woodland animals and weather, read “Autumn Thunder”; or another, “The Highest Football,” that uses the idea “opposites attract” as a springboard for the rest of the story.
Writing Activity: working with dialogue
The most remarkable part of Lena’s story as a demonstration of the power of dialogue is the last quarter, where four characters respond to a traumatic event. This section, beginning with the “No!” spoken by the narrator and continuing to the end, depends heavily on dialogue. It could almost be a play. Notice that, although the lines spoken by Sandy, Carrie, Mom, the narrator, and Mrs. Hall are often very short, we get a clear sense of how each character differs from the others and how they relate to each other as family, friends, and neighbors. This is accomplished through the narrative that accompanies the dialogue.
